20/10/10, Young Vic
Teenage boy on the way out: "That was so athletic." Teenage girl: "This may sound really gay, but the health and safety on that must be really intense."
The latest from the (highly athletic) Icelandic company Vesturport, this time directed rather than starring Gisli Orn Gardarsson. A version of the Faust epic -- in English rhyme, no less -- as performed by the inmates of an old people's home including an ancient, broke actor who played every tragic part in his time except Faust and whose attempted (successful?) suicide sparks the arrival of Mephisto and his henchpeople Asmodeus and Lilith and the telling of the familiar story. The love interest is Greta, the virginal nurse with an overly-protective elder brother, who also works at the care home; in the old actor's dream of Faust she turns up not in her white nurse's uniform but a white basque and tutu-like skirt, and v sexy she is too.
The whole thing played out on a wide stage with a mesh back wall and three windows, allowing us to see through to the snow falling outside, and with three traps, from one of which Lilith first appears bursting through the floor and flying on a rope which deposits her on a black net stretched right across the auditorium ten feet above the stage, on which actors and acrobats disport themselves from time to time (at the end of the interval the audience returns to find a silent actor in a dressing gown performing rather laboured silent film-style stunts with a runaway folding wheelchair). Actors fall backwards onto the net from the flies in sudden flashes of light. They swing from a trapeze above it. They somersault over the edge and hang by their hands to drop onto the stage. In the love scene the happy couple spin above the stage on ropes twined round their wrists.
Vesturport are really good at integrating the physical into serious drama, but less good at the straight acting. The first scene in the old people's home drags. Not helped by the fact that English is not the cast's first language: they speak it well, but often with intonation just that little bit "off".
There are a number of meta-theatrical gags. The silent oldster is warned to "mind the pit" as he walks towards one of the on-stage traps: he steps into it and literally bounces out. At the end of the first half there's a gag about forgetting one's lines and having to be prompted by one of the care home residents with the text... who then comes on with the same text a minute or two later and reads out (in rhyme) the announcement of the interval.
There are some nice gags generally, indeed: the care home residents keep fit by doing synchronised dancing in their wheelchairs to a George Michael track.
The general aesthetic is grungy. Mephisto wears a string vest with blood stains, and a frock coat and white leggings.
It all ends in tears. There's a Walpurgisnacht orgy (with only one witch, but then the cast is only nine strong) during which Greta loses her inhibitions to the extent of removing the basque, downstage centre, before matters are broken up by her furious brother who is put to sleep with a potion only to awake once more to break up the subsequent aerial love ballet. By this stage, in a move typical of the rough and ready approach, the older actor playing Faust has switched bodies with the younger actor playing Asmodeus, to make him both a more convincing suitor for Greta and a more capable acrobat.
In all this the moral issues raised by the Faust legend, or this version of it, get a little lost. Mephisto is infuriated by Faust's insistence for much of the time that however much he lusts after Greta he intends her to remain pure.
The music was by Nick Cave.
Ian McKellen was in the audience.
Showing posts with label physical theatre. Show all posts
Showing posts with label physical theatre. Show all posts
Friday, 22 October 2010
Friday, 4 September 2009
TRAPPED
30/8/09, Zoo Southside (Edinburgh Fringe)
Dance and physical theatre piece with five dancers (three men, two women, plus another man and a woman who made occasional uncredited contributions) choreographed by Maresa von Stockert. Dance as political allegory.
At the start the five come on to loud martial music, marching, wheeling, shooting, saluting while dressed in uniforms and yellow sashes. The era could be any time from the 1940s to the 1980s: a drab police state, perhaps soemwhere in Eastern Europe.
We hear a dissident young couple rowing in voice-over about his political activism while watching them dance: rolls, lifts, scissor movements up and over and under and around one another. First he holds her then she holds him, defying gravity and expectations. Physically it's breathtaking but the voice-over is unconvincing.
As they dance one of the uniforms enters their home and steals one of his shirts, stuffing it into a glass jar. Next we see two functionaries in white coats with little folding tables "analysing" two similar shirts extracted from glass jars. They snigg, measure, fold, unfold, eventually turning into dogs on all fours, tossing the shirts in their mouths.
The dissident's half-brother is stopped by the political police and questioned, threatened and urged to shop him, the scene accompanied by secret policeman's patter and more rolls and lifts.
Then we see the half-brother at work, filing. At the back of the stage are two cages on wheels, the back wall facing the audience filled with shelves of box files; they can be turned to reveal interiors. Now one is turned (by the dancer playing the half-brother, with considerable effort) to reveal a woman sitting surrounded by concertina files. She extracts a cup from one, then a saucer and then pours tea for our hero (the use of props throughout is extremely ingenious), then the concertina files on the floor develop a mind of their own and start rising out of the floor. The couple (it later turns out this is meant to be a dream sequence) are forced to take to the walls and then the ceiling of the cage to escape.
The dissident's wife is taken in for questioning and literally enmeshed by her interrogators in the coils of quarter-inch tape used to record the bugs in her home.
There are signs of diminishing imagination as we proceed. There's a frankly puerile scene when one of the men's wives comes to report her husband missing and a large box next to her eats her handbag and the functionary who greets her through a hole in the box files then comes round to dance with her... and with a banana that turns into a phone.
The music is as much FX as anything, with shades of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra now and then. The spoken text is variable: the secret policemen (one sporting a rat-like countenance and the pencil moustache of a 1940s spiv) are effective, at other times you just wish they'd shut up and get on with the dancing.
At the end the regime collapses. The marchers return but now their movements are jerky and nervous and, like the Duracell bunnies, they gradually run down, develop repetitive faults or get stuck in corners. A new regime takes over. One of the men in uniform deliberately changes his yellow sash and badge for a red badge and scarf then walks into one of the cages where there's a table and lamp... and attaches them to the ceiling, the world turned literally upside down.
Our heroes in jail cells push out the box files which scatter across the floor; they hang from the ceiling and walls; their wives dance in anguished fashion amid the litter of boxes at the back of the stage.
Then the functionaries of the new regime appear and robotically and methodically start to build a wall of boxes while the dissident disassembles some of the other box files and scatters them wildly about. At the end the wall is destroyed.
Mostly inventive, with real skill and passion in the dance, but the allegory sometimes a little too obvious. A pitifully and undeservedly small audience at 11 in the morning.
Dance and physical theatre piece with five dancers (three men, two women, plus another man and a woman who made occasional uncredited contributions) choreographed by Maresa von Stockert. Dance as political allegory.
At the start the five come on to loud martial music, marching, wheeling, shooting, saluting while dressed in uniforms and yellow sashes. The era could be any time from the 1940s to the 1980s: a drab police state, perhaps soemwhere in Eastern Europe.
We hear a dissident young couple rowing in voice-over about his political activism while watching them dance: rolls, lifts, scissor movements up and over and under and around one another. First he holds her then she holds him, defying gravity and expectations. Physically it's breathtaking but the voice-over is unconvincing.
As they dance one of the uniforms enters their home and steals one of his shirts, stuffing it into a glass jar. Next we see two functionaries in white coats with little folding tables "analysing" two similar shirts extracted from glass jars. They snigg, measure, fold, unfold, eventually turning into dogs on all fours, tossing the shirts in their mouths.
The dissident's half-brother is stopped by the political police and questioned, threatened and urged to shop him, the scene accompanied by secret policeman's patter and more rolls and lifts.
Then we see the half-brother at work, filing. At the back of the stage are two cages on wheels, the back wall facing the audience filled with shelves of box files; they can be turned to reveal interiors. Now one is turned (by the dancer playing the half-brother, with considerable effort) to reveal a woman sitting surrounded by concertina files. She extracts a cup from one, then a saucer and then pours tea for our hero (the use of props throughout is extremely ingenious), then the concertina files on the floor develop a mind of their own and start rising out of the floor. The couple (it later turns out this is meant to be a dream sequence) are forced to take to the walls and then the ceiling of the cage to escape.
The dissident's wife is taken in for questioning and literally enmeshed by her interrogators in the coils of quarter-inch tape used to record the bugs in her home.
There are signs of diminishing imagination as we proceed. There's a frankly puerile scene when one of the men's wives comes to report her husband missing and a large box next to her eats her handbag and the functionary who greets her through a hole in the box files then comes round to dance with her... and with a banana that turns into a phone.
The music is as much FX as anything, with shades of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra now and then. The spoken text is variable: the secret policemen (one sporting a rat-like countenance and the pencil moustache of a 1940s spiv) are effective, at other times you just wish they'd shut up and get on with the dancing.
At the end the regime collapses. The marchers return but now their movements are jerky and nervous and, like the Duracell bunnies, they gradually run down, develop repetitive faults or get stuck in corners. A new regime takes over. One of the men in uniform deliberately changes his yellow sash and badge for a red badge and scarf then walks into one of the cages where there's a table and lamp... and attaches them to the ceiling, the world turned literally upside down.
Our heroes in jail cells push out the box files which scatter across the floor; they hang from the ceiling and walls; their wives dance in anguished fashion amid the litter of boxes at the back of the stage.
Then the functionaries of the new regime appear and robotically and methodically start to build a wall of boxes while the dissident disassembles some of the other box files and scatters them wildly about. At the end the wall is destroyed.
Mostly inventive, with real skill and passion in the dance, but the allegory sometimes a little too obvious. A pitifully and undeservedly small audience at 11 in the morning.
Friday, 21 August 2009
ZEITGEIST
19/8/09, C Chambers Street (Edinburgh Fringe)
Only in Edinburgh (again). It's approaching midnight and you're on the top floor of a building in the Old Town, on a sweltering night (so hot that A felt ill) though mercifully there's a fan in the room to cool it down a little, watching eight dancers, naked but for G-strings and white body paint, pretending to be creatures emerging from cocoons. I think.
Four men, four women (though D thought one of the women started out as a man), three of the men and one of the women shaven-headed, the others with indecent amounts of hair (though only on their heads). They come from Oz and call themselves Zen Zen Zo. The music was new-agey, the movement controlled, often Butoh influenced: when the creatures woke up they turned into dancers, making Japanese-mask faces at us.
It was late, it was the fifth thing we'd seen that day and my memory is hazy. But there was a sequence where they ate raw eggs... then threw some at the audience. Another in which they donned shades and chunky red necklaces and pretended to be shrieking, airheaded women. One in which the men danced in Japanese costumes, arms and legs spread wide (A liked that the most). One involving simulated sex (A liked that the least). One in which they came forward in waves before collapsing and rolling to the back of the stage as the others stepped over them (S said that reminded her of Belsen).
Singular.
Only in Edinburgh (again). It's approaching midnight and you're on the top floor of a building in the Old Town, on a sweltering night (so hot that A felt ill) though mercifully there's a fan in the room to cool it down a little, watching eight dancers, naked but for G-strings and white body paint, pretending to be creatures emerging from cocoons. I think.
Four men, four women (though D thought one of the women started out as a man), three of the men and one of the women shaven-headed, the others with indecent amounts of hair (though only on their heads). They come from Oz and call themselves Zen Zen Zo. The music was new-agey, the movement controlled, often Butoh influenced: when the creatures woke up they turned into dancers, making Japanese-mask faces at us.
It was late, it was the fifth thing we'd seen that day and my memory is hazy. But there was a sequence where they ate raw eggs... then threw some at the audience. Another in which they donned shades and chunky red necklaces and pretended to be shrieking, airheaded women. One in which the men danced in Japanese costumes, arms and legs spread wide (A liked that the most). One involving simulated sex (A liked that the least). One in which they came forward in waves before collapsing and rolling to the back of the stage as the others stepped over them (S said that reminded her of Belsen).
Singular.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)